“Did you ever see her?”
“God no. I never wanted to. Nana Ingrid talked like she was still around, but this was at her married home, miles from where she grew up. She must’ve been making it up. She’d step out on the porch sometimes and stare down the dirt road like she was watching for the old hag, like she might spot her passing by and call her over if I didn’t behave. But that was just part of the threats. This was, what, thirty, forty years on from when she was living out there, so the woman had to be dead by then.”
Had to. Yes.
“It’s a hard old life, out like that.”
Had to. Unless a woman wasn’t what she was at all.
“You say Ingrid’s still with you?” Clarence said.
“She’s in a home now. Good days and bad days. But yeah.”
“Could she tell you where Daisy’s place was? Exactly? And how to find it?”
Paulette hesitated before answering, like someone who hated to let people down but would do it anyway. “Look, I was glad to help if I could, if it didn’t take too long, but I’m not looking for a new project to take on. And that Wal-Mart produce aisle isn’t going to run itself.”
“We’ll pay,” Will blurted. “We’ll make it worth your time.”
Clarence wondered how obvious it would be if he kicked his brother under the table.
“‘Worth your time’ is like ‘down the road a piece,’” Paulette said. “There’s lots of wiggle room in what it means.”
Two days later, on the word of Paulette’s grandmother — on one of her good days, he hoped — they headed out into the prairie wastes again, deeper than they’d ever had reason enough to go. There had never been much point to going where people were so few and far between that the land hardly seemed lived in at all.
It had once, though. The rubble and residue lingered. Along roads that had crumbled mostly back to dirt, they passed the scattered, empty shells of lives long abandoned. Separated by minutes and miles, the remains of farmhouses and barns left for ruin seemed to sink into seas of prairie grass. The trees hung on, as tenacious loners or clustering into distant, ragged rows that betrayed the hidden vein of a creek.
“I think this might be it. Where Nana grew up,” Paulette said from the back seat. “Can we stop?”
She’d been guiding them from a hand-drawn map that took over from where the printed map left off.
Clarence nosed the car toward the side of the road, sniffing for where the driveway used to be, and found it — a weedy land bridge between stretches of clogged ditch. He didn’t go far past. Any debris could be in that grass. He killed the engine and they got out to stand in the simmering silence of the day as Paulette compared the place as it was now with a photo borrowed from an album at her parents’ home.
“Is this it?” Will asked, and he sounded so tender.
“I think. I don’t know. But it should be. It’s just hard to tell.”
Of course it was. The picture showed life. However hardscrabble, it was life: a troop of skinny children, boys in overalls and girls in plain dresses, clowning around a swing fashioned from two ropes and a slat of wood. That could be the same oak, right there, sixty-odd years bigger. The sun-blasted, two-story farmhouse looked as though it could be the corpse of the one behind the children. It seemed to be the same roof, even though half of it was now gone, exposing a framework of rotting rafters. Unseen in the photo was a windmill out back that must’ve pumped their well. It still stood, a rusted, skeletal tower as tall as the house and crowned with a giant fan. A few of its sixteen blades had fallen free, while the rest ignored the wind, the gears too corroded to turn.
He reconsidered. There was still plenty of life here. It was just nothing human.
“It would kill her to see the place like this,” Paulette said. “Literally kill her.”
Which could have been an act of mercy. Yesterday’s trip to the nursing home had left him with a new appreciation for living out like this until the end. It had to hasten things, a swifter demise than being warehoused in a stinking building devoted to death by increments, surrounded by people whose bodies and minds raced to see which could deteriorate faster, and the cruelest thing was having enough of a mind left to realize you were one of them. Out like this, fall and break a hip? He’d take three days of dehydration on the floor over years of the other.
Paulette had wandered ahead of them in a daze, as if time had slowed, exploring the trunk of the oak, the front of the house, pieces of the past hidden in the weeds.
“I came from here. I came from this,” she said, although whom she was speaking to wasn’t clear. “And I never bothered to come see. Thirty miles, and I didn’t even come out for a look.”
“Nice we can pay her for the privilege,” Clarence murmured, not because he begrudged her the opportunity, but because he knew it would get a rise out of Will.
“Shut up. Don’t you say anything more about that,” Will said. “Besides, we aren’t paying her for anything. I am.”
And he didn’t know why it rankled him so. Years ago they’d vowed to never pay for information. It could only encourage people to lie. For that matter, why did it rankle him so much that his brother was now bankrolling each year’s venture? Because he could afford to, that’s why. Right now, at least, cloud architecture was some of the best money in IT, and this was the way Will wanted to spend it, and the worst part of it was that Will pulled in six figures doing something he excelled at but didn’t even enjoy. All the money in the world couldn’t buy him what he seemed to want most: to live in a simpler time.
“I’m sorry,” Clarence said. “I just want to get this done.”
“I know.”
“Except I don’t know what done is supposed to look like. Even if we find that old hag’s house and it’s still standing, we’re not going to walk in and find a skeleton at the table wearing Grandpa’s army dog tags. It’s never going to be that neat and clean.”
At their feet was a decayed shard of post snarled in a rusty length of galvanized fencing that twisted through the grasses and weeds like a wire snakeskin. Will stared at it, seeming to ponder how he might straighten it out, make it all better.
“I know,” he said again.
“I won’t ask you to promise today, but when we find it, at least start thinking that maybe it should be the end of the line.” He put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “We’ll find the place in the picture. We found out who the woman was. We got a name, and there might be some old records where we can find out a little more. That’s a lot. Maybe it should be enough to get to the last place Grandpa got to, and admit that the two of them are the only ones who know what happened next, and we just can’t know. But we got here. We closed that circle. Can you live with that?”
Will thought a moment, then nodded. “I guess I’ll have to. I just hope it’ll be enough for Mom.”
“Come on, slackers, let’s go!” Paulette called over to them from the car. He hadn’t even seen her return to it. “We haven’t got all day!”
Under the vast and cloudless prairie sky, they prowled roads no one seemed to travel anymore. He recalled that the area had once been called Biggsby, and had been so inconsequential as to not even merit inclusion on modern maps. By now there was no indication this place had ever deserved being thought of as a town. Biggsby — it was the name of a hostile field sprawling between horizons, a forgotten savannah where animals burrowed and mated and devoured each other undisturbed.
Paulette’s map seemed not quite right, maybe a casualty of faulty recollections: a curve in the road that shouldn’t have been there, an expected crossroad that wasn’t. They tracked and backtracked, futilely hoping to find things waiting just as they were in a photo shot fifty years ago. If only it could be as certain as spotting that inexplicable gauntlet of branches from Will Senior’s last photo.